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Two of the three people accused of fraud in a 2022 signature-gathering scandal were found guilty Monday, bringing an end to a nearly four-year saga that kept a number of candidates off the ballot due to phony signatures on their nominating petitions.
The convictions are a rare occurrence. Accusations of fraud — fake signatures, misleading statements, and more — permeate nearly every major election in Michigan, but people are almost never prosecuted, let alone punished, for it.
A Macomb County jury found Shawn Wilmoth and Willie Reed guilty of multiple felonies, including conducting a criminal enterprise and several counts of election law forgery. Jamie Wilmoth-Goodin, the third person accused, was found not guilty.
Ahead of the 2022 election, five Republican gubernatorial candidates and three judicial candidates used firms owned and operated by Wilmoth and Reed to collect the signatures they required to qualify for the ballot. After the candidates — who included former Detroit Police Chief James Craig and 2026 gubernatorial candidate Perry Johnson, turned in their nominating petitions — thousands of their signatures were found to be fraudulent and the candidates were kept off the ballot.
The Bureau of Elections released reports showing that for several candidates, signature gatherers made almost no effort to disguise the forged signatures, leading to full pages of nearly identical handwriting. Others tried to make the words intentionally illegible. In a 2023 press release announcing the charges against Wilmoth, Reed, and Wilmoth-Goodin, Attorney General Dana Nessel called the methods “sophomoric and transparent.”
Wilmoth and Reed charged the candidates more than $700,000 for the signatures, Nessel said in a release Monday.
It’s standard practice to hire signature gatherers to collect the 15,000 signatures needed to make the ballot as a statewide candidate. While candidates are considered responsible for the signatures, there is no indication they were aware of the wrongdoing.
The scandal reshaped the 2022 Republican primary for governor, as some of the affected candidates were considered to be front-runners in the race. But Michigan’s laws around signature gathering have not changed in the time since. Signature gatherers remain powerful and largely unregulated in the state. They’re permitted to lie to potential signers, for example, and have no obligation to let someone read the petition before they sign.
Michigan lawmakers have for years introduced legislation to try to address these issues. But such bills are rarely legislative priorities and tend to be pushed off.
“The fraud perpetrated by the defendants robbed eight candidates of their chance to appear on the ballot, defrauded their campaigns and denied millions of Michiganders a choice in the 2022 gubernatorial election,” Nessel said in a press release Monday.
An attorney for Reed declined to comment Monday evening. Attorneys for Wilmoth and Wilmoth-Goodin did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
Wilmoth and Reed are set to be sentenced March 18. The most serious of the charges — conducting a criminal enterprise and using false pretenses involving $100,000 or more — each carries a maximum sentence of 20 years.
Hayley Harding is a reporter for Votebeat based in Michigan. Contact Hayley at hharding@votebeat.org.
